“There,” she said.
“I don’t want to go.”
She took me by the hand and dragged me out of the apartment. An impotent ball of fury swelled in my chest as we rode the elevator down to the lobby, but when we stepped out the front door, I held her hand tightly, grateful to not be alone. The sun had fallen behind the buildings to the west, the sky a dusky shade of blue.
“How many people are going to be there?” I asked, as a steady stream of cars rolled past on the street.
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t do this.”
“Taxi!”
“Please don’t make me do this.”
But she’d already flagged down a cab and was handing the driver a card with the event’s location. In the back seat of the car, all the muscles in my stomach collapsed on a single stabbing point. “Kim…”
She extracted a pill caddy and a bottle of water from her purse. The driver watched us curiously in the rear-view mirror as Kim shook out pills of different shapes and sizes. I swallowed them all and she patted my leg. “Close your eyes. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
“I want to go home.”
“Twenty minutes,” she said, firmly.
I sat back and shut my eyes. My stomach lurched every time the car took a sharp corner. I was about to insist that the driver stop and let me out when a spigot in my chest twisted, and all the tension flooded from my body. I opened my eyes and looked at Kim. Whatever she saw in my face made her grin. “Better?” she asked.
I nodded, intrigued by the sensation of my head going up and down.
“Good. We’re almost there.”
The cab pulled up outside the auditorium and we climbed out together, no longer holding hands. The student at the door gave me an identity card and directed me across the foyer to the event organizer, a man with a long face and prominent incisors, who narrowed his eyes as we approached.
“Mr. Mallory?” he said.
“That’s right,” Kim said.
“Present,” I confirmed, listing to one side and catching myself.
The man’s upper lip twitched, exposing his front teeth and I snorted. His nose began to lengthen and I laughed out loud.
“He’s fine,” Kim said.
“I’m fine,” I agreed in a strangled voice.
The organizer looked unconvinced. “Things will be getting underway soon,” he said, tersely. “You’d better come with me.”
The more suspicious he became, the more rat-like he looked. Nearly weeping with suppressed laughter, I left Kim to join the main crowd and followed him through a side door into the darkened auditorium, past a group of students watching a disaster movie on a small television. A building on fire. Stampeding men and women in business attire. A news ticker rolled across the bottom of the screen, and I realized that it wasn’t a movie. Somewhere in the world, this was actually happening. The organizer kept me moving with a forceful nudge, steering me over to the wings of the stage, where he melted back into the shadows. A handful of authors were milling around, unaware that I’d joined them. From their subdued conversation, I gathered three things:
1. None of them had taken a cocktail of unknown psychotropic drugs on the cab ride over.
2. Armed rebels had just seized the American embassy in an obscure but strategically important Middle Eastern country.
3. The sleeve of my jacket was on fire.
I flapped my arm and the fire went out.
“Looks like a good turnout,” one of the other authors observed. I smiled at her, before realizing that she was talking to the person next to me. For a brief moment, I was back in high school, raising my hand to Nikki Pederson in response to a wave that she’d actually—and obviously—directed at someone over my shoulder. The house lights dimmed and the emcee for the evening strolled out to the podium, dressed in black, his silver hair gleaming. As he began to speak, a hot wind blew across the stage and the spotlight became a sun, beating down through a smoky haze onto the shimmering face of the American embassy. Children with automatic rifles grinned down at me from the compound’s high walls. A distorted voice crackled through a megaphone, reciting a long list of names before compelling me to approach the flaming building. I moved through a grove of smoldering trees. The embassy appeared to be constructed of cardboard and glue, smoke pouring from its windows. Inside, someone was either shrieking in pain or furiously playing an out-of-tune violin. I climbed the steps to the front door and gripped an ornate handle. Then everything went quiet.
The emcee was standing over in the wings. I’d replaced him at the podium.
Fainting would have been the logical thing to do, but I remained painfully conscious under the audience’s collective gaze, my legs having lost half their muscle tone. The auditorium was packed. I looked over at the emcee and he made a frantic encouraging motion. I gripped the podium and leaned into the microphone.
“Hello.”
My voice reverberated through the auditorium. The spotlight stabbed at my eyes. A copy of The Pole rested on the podium in front of me. Clearly, I was meant to read from it. “Okay,” I muttered, thumbing through the book, or trying to thumb through it, as some prankster had glued the pages together. A quiet rage poured into my head as I struggled to pry the book open. I glared out at the crowd and they stared back at me without expression. I was about to hurl the book into their midst, when a familiar face came into focus in the front row. She wore eyeglasses, and her long red hair had been cut in a short, angular style, but I would have recognized her anywhere. The book in my hands cracked open. I looked down in surprise, then back up at Jasmine. She gave me an encouraging smile. I took a shaky breath and started to read.
There had been no good reason for Jeremy to weigh in on the Banister scandal.
The line was so unfamiliar that I read on with genuine curiosity.
He didn’t know Ted Banister. They taught at different schools. Jeremy had nothing to gain by offering his point of view. But he had, and the moment he did, the dozens of apathetic young faces before him filled with interest. “To be clear,” he said, walking it back a little, wondering how he’d segued from Madame Bovary to this, “Professor Banister’s actions ought to be investigated. There’s no doubt about that. But I can’t help wondering if his suspension was a tad premature.”
At the back of the room, a hand shot into the air. Jeremy’s diaphragm clenched. He paced behind the lectern, eyes sliding over the athletic blonde owner of the hand. “There are multiple sides to every story,” he hurried on. “In life as in literature, there are reliable and unreliable narrators. At the moment, we have one perspective. I think we’d do well to reserve our judgment until all the facts have been gathered—”
The girl’s hand was still in the air, waving now. Jeremy threw a look at the empty spot where Madeline would usually be sitting. It had been nearly a week since he’d seen her. She hadn’t responded to any of his recent texts. He was starting to feel desperate.
“These are dangerous times,” he said, making eye contact with a few of the male students. “When the word of one individual can destroy a life, we should all be very concerned. A mere allegation—”
“Serious allegation,” the blonde girl interrupted, no longer content to wait.
Jeremy looked at her. “I’m sorry?”